Visionary art of Lobsang Melendez Ahuanari
By Emily Anne Utia
I couldn’t even begin to imagine this tiny little being, being cut open, especially in the conditions of the current medical facility. Thus began some of the most high anxiety hours as of yet. The doctor had told us that William was living off the IV for too long and something had to be done or he was not going to make it. It was so difficult to get any straight information about where this idea came from and what exactly they planned to do, as the different doctors were saying different things.
William being airlifted to a private clinic in Lima.
Everything snapped into clear vision and things started to happen fast. I was absolutely certain we had to get William out of there immediately. It was late morning and I rushed out to get Emanuel and get back to our apartment where we got the ball rolling for the transport immediately. It was a MIRACLE what happened from there and absolutely once again, a testament to the power of prayer. My youngest sister had also arrived to help and help she did. Between her, another sister in the US, and the grace of my parent’s credit card, everything was arranged for William to be rescued the next day. It all just started happening so fast from that moment of clarity and after the absolute worst 11 days of my life, we prepared to be whisked off to Lima the next morning.
It truly felt like a swarm of angels that showed up at the hospital the next afternoon. I was beside myself with anxiety waiting for a doctor to show up. I hadn’t been allowed back at all to see William that morning and there was definitely a whole buzz in the infant ward about what we were doing. I didn’t care. Nothing could stop us now. When the medic transport team finally arrived, all I could do was watch from afar as they transferred William to their incubator and to a new IV and all their tubes and when they finally wheeled him out to the waiting room, it was the closest I got to be to him in days. Oh my heart, when I remember that tiny being in there. It was all I could do to hold back my wildly raging motherly instinct that wanted to just grab him right out of there and hold him against my chest.
Emanuel and I rode with William in the tiny airplane that lifted us out of Cusco and that whole nightmare and landed us in the next leg of our journey in Lima, where William was admitted to a private medical facility that was as nice if not nicer than a hospital in the U.S. The team there had a surgeon on call, based on the reports from the previous hospital but wanted to do their own evaluation first. Emanuel and I approached the infant unit with extreme hesitation after the traumatic treatment in the other hospital but to our absolute joy, we were immediately escorted inside TOGETHER and told to disrobe under our hospital gowns so we could get William onto our skin right away. Oh my sweet baby boy, finally in my arms, against my chest, sharing our breath. 13 days after his birth, I finally could hold my son in my arms.
Over the course of the next couple days, we got into a new routine at this beautiful and very modern clinic, of holding William for hours between feedings and pumping. I was given a new breast pump and with that and being able to hold William, my milk slowly came back, as I had been having difficulty pumping the tiny bit needed for his feedings. To our astonishment, not only could this clinic find nothing wrong with William, they went from feeding him 3cc’s to 30cc’s in just a few days, with no sign of distress or vomiting. It seemed the more we were able to interact with our baby boy, they more he began to thrive.
This is truly testament to the incredible need that newborn babies have to be immediately put into the arms of their parents. William needed to feel us in order to have the unconscious motivation to choose life. In the 10 days we were there, William began to take up to 45 mls of milk, MY milk, at each feeding; he gained weight, and even FINALLY breastfeed. It was and still is an absolute miracle to marvel at and I am so grateful for my prayer for clarity being answered that day to get William out of the other hospital before allowing them to perform an open abdominal surgery!
On Monday morning, October 28, exactly 3 weeks after his birth in Cusco, Emanuel and I alongside my parents and sister walked out of the clinic with William in arms. He was still so tiny at 4.5 lbs, and even after the long fight to get him home with us, I was suddenly nervous about how to care for this fragile being. The worst of the storm was over, but we still had many challenges ahead of us to navigate.
We wound up having to give up our home in Pisac that we had spent so much time and resources preparing for our new little family to live in while we waited for Emanuel’s immigration process to be finished. The people we were renting from actually started making posts about us “abandoning” the property and their cats even though they knew what was happening. As hugely and incredibly frustrating and disheartening as this was, this treatment gave us the lucidity that we were not meant to go back there. Ever. I actually sent Emanuel and my dad from Lima to go pack up our life there and bring to us in Lima what they could stuff into suitcases, where we were needing to stay for at least another month or so.
My parents and sister left the following week and our new reality began to set in. It was like being lifted up in a tornado and then being dropped down somewhere completely different when it was over. What the heck were we going to do in Lima? Neither Emanuel nor I are city folks, him less so than I. Emanuel grew up in a small village out in the Amazon jungle and had never left until I came along. And here we were, stuck in a tiny apartment in a world of concrete and traffic, noise, and pollution, far away from anyone we knew, alone with our tiny infant.
The next few months were really hard as much as they were amazing to be with William. My postpartum reality finally began to set in and I never had felt more alone in my entire life. There was no meal train, no visits from friends, no one else to hold or gawk at our baby. To go outside and try to find a bit of nature meant navigating busy and dirty streets of loud traffic. It was always a toss up of which was worse, being stuck inside or trying to go outside.
My grief and disappointment over the unexpected conditions we found ourselves in only grew. What happened to my organic life surrounded by nature and committed to natural and plant medicines? How did I wind up bringing my son into his life in a world of needles, pharmaceuticals, operations, and being in the care of strangers before my own? When did I suddenly toss out my commitment to eating only organic food, especially at such a crucial time?
All of it is so very humbling and the truth is none of that mattered. All that seemed important anymore was surrounding William with love and helping him to grow and thrive, holding him in our arms as much as possible and beginning a process of repair to recalibrate all of our nervous systems.
This seemed especially hard in the city limits of Lima with constant noise and a busy city around us. My nervous system pretty much stayed in flight-or-flight mode until we eventually landed in the United States and moved into my parent’s home in NY. Even now still, there is residual anxiety trying to make sense of all the pieces and also because of having to separate William from his Dada after all that without knowing when we will all be together once again.
When William was just shy of three months, we did take him out to our Amazonian jungle home to see if we could make a go of it there. We were all just desperately craving nature and he seemed stable enough at that point to make the journey. Unfortunately, after being there only a few days, it was obvious it wasn’t going to work. We don’t have a developed enough living space to shelter and care for an infant and it just was too hard. It was then I knew what I had to do and even Emanuel agreed. William and I were going to leave Peru for the comfort of my parents’ home in NY where we could rest and truly begin a healing process.
Separating our family was never part of the plan, but then again neither was a C-section birth, being separated from my newborn son for almost 2 weeks, or moving to Lima. At this point, all rules were off and we had to make difficult decisions from a heartfelt place and not with any ego influence of judgment. We had been uprooted and misplaced and I desperately needed to rest and heal my body after already getting in infection from my surgical wound. Plus, the tension between Emanuel and I was getting to be too much and, even though it meant separating father and son, it seemed that space was necessary for both of us to reflect and recalibrate.
The plan was to return to Peru in April if things had not progressed with Emanuel’s immigration process. As if, there having been enough unplanned out-of-the-ordinary events, now here we are amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused Peru to indefinitely shut down their international borders, making it completely impossible for our family to re-unite for an indefinite amount of time on top of prolonging the immigration process even more.
So here we still are, living in my parent’s home praying for spring to come and bring a warmth that will uplift and inspire us. At almost 40 years old, living with my parents is definitely not what I expected. So here is the lesson of surrender appearing again. As I watch William grow each day, getting stronger and more adorable, I commit to trust and to faith. My son is my prince of patience, teaching me to be present in the now moment and to see the blessings I have instead of living in the past or the future and grasping for something I don’t have.
Here the waters are calm, the house is warm, and the washing machine works, allowing me the space and solitude I need to take responsibility for all that has passed and to forgive myself for the way I pushed things to happen a certain way, ignoring the strong intuitive voice within, to forgive my midwife, forgive the doctors in Cusco and forgive Emanuel. It is only with forgiveness that the path forward will open with clarity. Here is where I begin to process through my grief and my guilt, allowing it to be what it is and allowing it to ignite self-love at the same time. Faith and love is what creates miracles and a miracle is what we want now to bring our family together again.
I still feel that twinge when I see posts from other women in their pregnancy or birth, surrounded by nature, in their homes, and hear the success stories of natural home births of healthy babies. I wanted that so much and I can never change the story of my past to be that. I still have numbness in my womb that only time and gentle, loving awareness can awaken. I feel disconnected from my yoni, like it just shut down on me. I felt so inadequate, not being able to open and bring a child through my vaginal space and still have a lot of work to do around that.
But the work I will do because my son is worth it, because I am worth it. Because at the end of the day, what birth ISN”T natural? To compare is only to despair and I can only allow myself to dwell in that space for a short moment before pulling myself out to look in the eyes of my beautiful son. The fact that his placenta wound up in the trash instead of planted with a tree doesn’t actually influence the person he is becoming and I am so in love with him regardless of the way he came into this world. To see him happy, healthy and thriving; to be able to feed him from my breast after everything we went through, these are my greatest joys and they help me to chose presence and trust over fear and uncertainty.
I pray that we all grow stronger during this time and that we remember trust and faith and love, that we remember there is always a plan bigger than we can see and riding the current is easier than fighting against it. That, as women, we always do what we need to do for the sake of our children, even if it means going against a belief or idea that was from yesterday, as today is a new day and it is the biggest blessing of all to have the honor to be a mother, a woman, a life-giver. Above all, I pray that we all listen to and fully trust our intuition, the voice of our highest self that guides each of us each day, so long as we are open and willing to listen.
In addition to being a new mama, Emily Anne Utia is a natural wellness practitioner dedicated to holistic healing arts which span different cultures. For the past ten years, she has been studying native healing practices from North America including Hawaii, as well as the Peruvian Amazon and high mountains of Columbia. Emily works alongside her husband, Emanuel, native to the Amazon jungle, and together they study, educate, and offer traditional treatments utilizing the vegetalista tradition of plant medicine. Together, they created Machimpuro, Centro para Plantas Naturales, a small and rustic center located in the depths of the Peruvian Jungle. In addition, Emily has her own U.S. based healing practice called Wahine de La Selva. Before dedicating her life to natural wellness, Emily worked as a professional child and family therapist in the field of speech and language pathology. Her own story of how she overcame depression, anxiety, and addiction is shared through her book, Awaken, a 21st Century Manifesto, which can be found on amazon.com.